Compact Discs (CD's) and Digital Versatile Disks (DVD's) have been developed to increase the amount of data that can be stored on a storage medium. These types of storage media have data on them in the form of pits and lands that are written and read with lasers along a track. Generally, the track is helical in shape and each pass of the track is separated from adjacent passes of the track by a track pitch. A standard single sided CD can store approximately 800 Megabytes of data, while a double-sided CD can store 1600 Megabytes of data. A DVD, has a track pitch of about 0.74 microns and a single side/single layer DVD can store about 4.4 Gigabytes of data, which is roughly equivalent to about 2 hours of movie playing time.
Therefore, some movies and other types of digital content cannot fit on a CD and can very easily be too large to even fit on a DVD. Furthermore, with the advent of certain technologies and business plans for the distribution of “content”, it may be advantageous to store a library of digital content, such as movies, on a single removable storage medium. Current CD's and DVD's cannot be used for such purposes.